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Through a Textual Glass, Darkly: the Masochistic in the Feminine Self and Marguerite Duras' Raylene Ramsay Simmons College

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Through a Textual Glass, Darkly: the Masochistic in the Feminine Self and Marguerite Duras' Raylene Ramsay Simmons College Through a Textual Glass, Darkly: The Masochistic in the Feminine Self and Marguerite Duras' Raylene Ramsay Simmons College ABSTRACT This paper examines the inversions operated by proliferating specular images in Duras, seeking the meanings of Emily L.'s masochistic sacrifice of her poetry to her love for the "Captain." The Durassian subject takes form in the movement between looking and being looked at. Emily L., in her indecency and closeness to death, embodies the disturbing strangeness of the perverse desire of the watching narrator, Duras. The telescoping of the dichotomies of the fearful states at the origins of writing (self-loss in, or separation from, the other) also involves a movement between a "masculine" position of desire that seeks to kill and a "feminine" position excited by self-dispossession, a position problematically valorized in Emily L RESUME Cet article examine les inversions operees dans les images speculates qui proliferent chez Duras, a la recherche des sens du sacrifice masochiste que fait Emily L. de ses talents de poete a son amour pour le «Capitaine». Le sujet durassien prend forme dans le va-et- vient entre le regard qu'il pose et qui est pose" sur lui. Emily L., dans son indecence et sa proximitl a la mort, personnifie la troublante etrangete' du desir pervers du narrateur (Duras) qui la regarde. Le mouvement qui telescope les dichotomies des dtats de peur a l'origine de l'ecriture (la perte de soi dans l'autre ou la separation d'avec l'autre) implique aussi un mouvement entre une position «masculine» de d6sir ou Ton cherche a tuer et une position «feminine» ou Ton cherche la d£possession, position valorise* de faoon problematique dans Emily L X RADmONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AS ELAINE Marks At the very beginning of L'Amant, Duras, succinctly recapitulates in her discussion of the sig• addressed as "vous," chooses, somewhat discon• nificant origins of the genre,1 arises in the narcis• certingly, to see herself through the gaze of another sistic project of the search for love (self-love, love —a male admirer (the brother of Prevert). Her face, for the other, the reader's love). In the recent "new however, is no longer the transparent beauty of a autobiographies" of the French nouveaux roman- youthful photograph, but is ravaged ("devaste") by ciers—works pursuing the (im)possibility of the the individualized irreducible suffering of age and return of the self in an age of suspicion and of the living, what Julia Kristeva sees, in a crucial article primacy of language—such narcissistic and libidinal on Duras, as "The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern mirrors multiply self-consciously within the texts World." This, her interlocutor tells Duras, is the to serve a number of arguably (gender) specific face that he prefers. Product of intersubjectivity or purposes.2 of the gaze of the Other, transfigured by collective suffering, the subject also sees/reads herself in the Chauvin, her factory worker interlocutor, meet in a mirror as monstrous and a fond object of time's bar of the Northern port to reconstruct the story of "brutality." ("j'ai vu s'operer ce vieillissement de the crime passionnel to which they have been wit• mon visage avec I'interet que j'aurais pris par ex- ness from the probing of the other's inner life and emple du deroulement d'une lecture" \ "I saw this desires. The setting, the character set, and the cen• aging of my face take place with the interest I tral movement of Emily L. that telescopes the in• would have taken, for example, in the unfolding of dividual and the collective, mirroring self in the a reading" [10].) Other in intersubjectivity and working against the high textual self-consciousness through the prolif• These specular and textual images, Durassian eration of doubles, are already present here. So, inversions, and juxtaposition of opposites frustrate too, is the oscillation between a sadistic conventional readings. It is a general feminist tenet "masculine" position of desire that actively seeks to that the woman who refuses to be the objectified dominate or hierarchize, to kill—Chauvin—and a "Other" of the dominant masculine gaze postulated "feminine" position excited by social/sexual by Simone de Beauvoir or Laura Mulvey must as• degradation—Anne's desire for/of the unknown men sert her subjectivity by looking (at) herself in the from the factory passing in the street—that seeks mirror. Yet being seen/seeing with the gaze of the humiliation and self-loss in alcohol, submission to outside other/lover (or indeed reader) has always the desire of the dominating other, self-dissolution been central to Duras' scheme of things. Being and death. It could also be argued that what is looked at and looking, being read and reading or already at stake in the text is the superordinance of writing the other, imply vital constant movements the writing and the violent doubling (suppression) of repeated mirroring and of oscillation (between, of life by language. As in Duras' later texts, the for example, active exhibitionism and passive voy• subordinate is valorized. eurism) that replace any static photographic dicho• tomy (seeing/being seen, self/[m]other or self/ Emily L. (1987) projects a sense at once of the [brjother) in her work. play of familiar forms duplicated or multiplied, ghosts trying out new shapes in the mirror, and of In L'Amant, which has been portrayed as a the fierce re-tuming of subordinate and repressed work generated from old photographs,3 the narrator desire in the ever more present face of death. The comments that the posed family scenes that the writer as solitary, masterful subject creating and mother has taken regularly as a record of her chil• controlling her characters continues to systemati• dren being seen are not a laying bare of a truth, but cally choose self-dissolution over self-conscious• rather a dressing up and a fixing. Likewise, the re• ness through the splitting or multiplying of femi• touched photo her mother has prepared for her nine narrative positions (the "je"/"elle"/la petite grave in the Vietnamese tradition observes photo• prostituee in L'Amant, the "je"-Duras/"elle"-Emily graphic conventions that make everyone look simi• L./"La femme du capitaine" in Emily L.) while lar and conceals rather than reveals individual suggesting the difficulties with and unreliability of identity. male narrators (Jacques Hold and Peter Morgan in Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein). It is only through Existence, like identity, must take form in the other observed and the observing of self by the response to, or in seeing/reading others, as Mari• other lover-reader ("regardez-moi" says Marguerite anne Hirsch claims in her interpretation of the in L'Amant), that is, through a circulation of desire mediations of the Durassian text. It therefore holds that I-the writer can come to speak. much of the indirectness of fiction. For Hirsch, Duras' Moderato Cantabile is an enacting of such a The story of Emily L* takes shape in the re• literary process of reading—an empathetic imita• sponses of a narrator, recognizable as Duras, and tion. In this novel, Anne Desbaresdes, wife of a her interlocutor, himself identifiable as the younger, factory manager in a French seaside town, and homosexual (and thus non-superordinate) male companion of recent years, Yann Andrea, to a sec• As in Irigaray's theory of feminine speech, ond couple they observe daily in the port bar while there is no unity of the subject or possibility of on vacation close to where the Seine flows to the clear subjectivity or objectivity in this looking sea at Quilleboeuf. The narrator attributes her fas• (reading/writing). cination to the woman's abjection, the "indecency" and the humility of her continuing existence so pas un sujet qui pose devant lui en objet. D n'y very close to death. "Little lizard" ("Petite iguane"): a pas cette double polarite sujet/objet, enoncia- this fictional double somewhat resembles the des• tion/enonce. D y a une sorte de va-et-vient cription Duras gave in a recent interview for The continu, du corps de l'autre a son corps. \ not a New York Times with Alan Riding of her own di• subject which poses in front of itself as object. minished state after her treatment for alcoholism There are not those dual poles of subject-ob• ject, enunciation-enunciated. There is a kind of and recent illness. The physically ravaged other, an continual movement back and forth from the aging alcoholic isolated on her bar stool alongside body of the other to one's own. (Le Corps-a - her younger "husband," hair with graying roots corps avec la mere, 136). dyed and redyed, a "bundle of rags" with broken nails and teeth, laughing and moaning in inarticu• Self-revelation may come from this self-efface• late madness, comes to embody the "disturbing ment or displacement, "the mystery of seeing one• strangeness" (the Unheimliche) of the narrator's self as other" (249) as Sanford Ames describes in own desire. Lol V. Stein's desaisissement in the rye field as she watches the window of the hotel where Jacques Desire in Emily L.'s narrator is, most immedi• Hold (the narrator who watches her) and Tatiana ately, the sudden fierce tenderness of the need to are making love. These slippages or oscillations hold the bird-like skinniness of the dying Emily L. from one position to another, from narcissistic against herself. However, Duras' version of Love- identification (displacement/self-effacement) to Story is less simple than that popular sentimental libidinal identification (love), from mother to film, even if it, too, requires the suffering and daughter, daughter to father (or brother substitute), imminent death of the heroine to bring about the feminized minority lover to machistic hunter broth• spectator's transfiguring identification.
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